Category Archives: I Had a Dream

This past weekend I ran my 500th mile of the year. In honor of this occasion, I’d like to share with you a dream I had recently.

In this dream, I was housesitting for my sister, who was out of town. I had just walked into her apartment when I realized with horror that the apartment had been broken into. Even scarier, I soon figured out that the burglars were still there. Instead of getting the hobnob out of there, I did what any respectable dream-self would do: I walked right up to the burglars.

“What are you doing in here?” I boldly queried them. They turned towards me, contemplating my mean mug, and then silently but deliberately approached me. Since these bad guys seemed unwilling to engage in an honest conversation about why in Beelzebub’s name they were in the apartment, and since I had nothing else to say at this point, I decided it was an excellent time to get on out of there. So I started running.

Here is the part of the traditional chase dream narrative where the protagonist feels stuck in mud, like time has slowed down, or as if her sluggish muscles are no longer willing to cooperate with her desperate brain. I’ve had several dreams over the years that are exactly like that: something is chasing me, but I cannot for the life of me move faster than a frog stuck in an especially slimy bog.

This dream was nothing like that. I spun away from those bad guys and headed for the hills, running as fast as I like to imagine I would run if I were competing in a middle-distance Olympic race. Outside the dream-apartment was a winding corridor, and I high-tailed it through that hallway.

I ran and ran, then looked over my shoulder to see how the chase was coming along. The bad guys were running after me, but they weren’t gaining any ground.

At that point, my dream-brain thought to itself, “I can run faster and farther than these bad guys.” And that’s exactly what I did. I ran until the bad guys got tired and stopped chasing me.

I have no idea what happened to my sister’s dream-belongings. While I ran my dream-heart out, the bad guys almost certainly went straight back to her apartment and finished their ransacking. Sorry about that, Meredith. My dream-self is a great runner, but a terrible housesitter.

I am obsessed with Picasso. You probably already know this because I wrote about him a few months ago when I talked about the Museum Berggruen in Berlin, and also because I am also obsessed with two things related to Picasso: modernism (the cultural period in history from roughly 1914 to 1945) and World War I. Since going to the Museum Berggruen back in August, I have seen Picasso all over everywhere. These are the places where I have found him:

The Pinakothek der Moderne: here in Munich there are like a thousand art museums, but for the sake of simplicity I’m going to say there are four major ones. The Old and New Pinakotheks have really old artwork and not-so-old artwork, respectively. The Museum Brandhorst has some modern art. The biggest collection of modern art, though, is in the Pinakothek der Moderne. They have like three Picasso paintings, some Kandinskys, and lots from German modern artists. Oh, and their first acquisition was a gorgeous Matisse still life with geraniums. It’s called Still Life with Geraniums. It was one of only a few paintings from the museum to survive the Second World War, and it is lovely.

The National Gallery: I visited London about a month ago and went to this museum for the first time. There are all sorts of paintings here from the olden days up to the newen days. Of course I focused my viewing efforts on the modernist section, and of course I found several more Picassos here. There were also other things, like van Gogh’s yellow and wonderful Chair and Seurat’s giant painting of some dotted people hanging out at a dotted river.

The British Museum: while wandering around this museum, which is not an art museum, I found two small rooms in the back that had art exhibits. One had some post-WWII German artists’ works on display, and I swear my Picasso radar is getting just perfectly honed because THE OTHER EXHIBIT WAS PICASSO. The works were two linocuts the museum had recently acquired: one a portrait of one of his 47 million lovers, and the other a still life of a lamp and some fruit.

Now that you understand my infatuation with Picasso and modern art, you will not be surprised to hear that last week, when I visited America for a few days, I had a dream that I went to Fayetteville and visited its modern art museum that was on a train and was shaking and quaking like trains are wont to do. While I was in the museum-train, I was like, oh museum-train, that makes sense and is an excellent idea. It can travel around and visit different towns and everyone can see the beautiful Picassos and Matisses and van Goghs and such. But then I woke up and realized I was not on a museum-train, but that instead the bed was merely doing its best impersonation of a museum-train because of my sister’s quite violent tossing and turning.

After this dream, I was devastated by the reality that Northwest Arkansas doesn’t actually have a modern art museum. BUT THEN I learned today that Crystal Bridges has a temporary exhibit on modern art! And some of the works are from Picasso! It will be there until July 7th, so all you NWAliens, get yerself over there real quick-like, yeh hear?

The moral of this whole story is that I am slowly turning into a prophet, so if you want me to sense the seemingly unknowable connections in the universe for you, just let me know and I will make an appointment to take a nap on my sister’s museum-train-bed.

Picasso’s linocut of a lamp and some fruit. Don’t tell anyone I took this picture because it was probably illegal but they should just be thankful I did this instead of touching it with my grubby paws like I really wanted to do.

Last night I dreamed that my mom, my sister, and I were going on a grand adventure to Somewhereville, so we packed all our stuff into two suitcases and headed to the airport.

On the way there, whoever was driving did something mildly illegal like turning a U-ie or rolling through a stop sign or running over a pedestrian, and a Copper saw it and tried to pull us over. We didn’t have time for none of that law-abiding stopping nonsense, so we just kept on keepin’ on. And sure enough, soon after that we had a whole slew of angry Po-lice chasin’ after us.

We realized the situation had escalated rather quickly and gotten just plain out of hand, but we just really weren’t ready for orange jumpsuits, so we escaped the Copper chase and found refuge in my great-grandmother’s house, where all my relatives were feastin’ on the usual Southern delicacies like Mexican cornbread and sweet tea and love. Of course the Po-lice found us there eventually, and my relatives were like, “Hope youins are ready to go to jail ha ha ha!”

Then the three of us decided to walk out of the house with our hands up, because obviously that appeases the Authorities and makes it less likely that they will throw you in the Slammer. But still we somehow knew that we were gonna get locked up for seven to thirteen years.

Before they could take us away, we had to watch a giant circus performance out in the front yard. It was your usual nighttime-front-yard-you-fought-the-Law-and-the-Law-won circus show: acrobats and fireworks and sneering faces who you suspect are in on what you hope is just a really great joke and not the preamble to your new Life in Incarceration.

Then I joined in on the acrobatic flippin’ and floppin’ and soon remembered that duh, I know how to fly. So I did. And everyone was like, “Jeez, Molly. Not again. Get down here already so you can get arrested.”

And that, my dearies, is why you should never eat spoonfuls of Nutella before bed.